In the winter, we'd be outdoors constantly. They warned us to stay away from the frozen lakes down at the marsh but we went anyway, yes, we'd occasionally crash through the thin ice and we'd run home with our wet clothes freezing on the way home. But we'd change our clothes and be right back down there again.
I remember summer days where we'd be out of doors from morning to dark with mothers (didn't matter what house) handing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and cups of "bug juice" to us out the window so we didn't have to go inside even for lunch. Somehow, nobody was allergic to peanut butter in those days. If any of us did dare to venture inside the house on a nice day, we'd be immediately put to work. So we learned to stay away! Forget about sitting around the house watching TV. During the week, Mom was watching her soap operas and on the weekends, Dad was watching his ballgames. The only time we got to watch TV was for Saturday morning cartoons and wrestling and maybe an hour or two before bedtime where we'd watch the Partridge Family, The Brady Bunch, Dragnet, Adam-12, or maybe a John Wayne movie.
On the really hot days, we'd sit on a picnic table in somebody's yard in the shade, playing endless games of Monopoly, Risk or checkers/chess. Board games were big in those days. Otherwise, we were on our bikes all over town.
There was always a portable radio around tuned to the local Top 40 AM station. They would play the same hit songs endlessly so that even 35 years later, I can call up songs in my head like "Billy, Don't Be A Hero," "Seasons In The Sun," "Love Will Keep Us Together", "The Night Chicago Died" and "Fox On The Run" even though I haven't actually heard those songs in decades!
During the summer of 1975, I remember riding in the back of my uncle's open pickup all the way from Boston to Alabama with five other kids and a dog. While we were in Tennessee, we drove through a thunderstorm and my uncle pulled off to the side under an overpass somewhere on I-81 so those of us in the back could get some shelter and dry off. If we tried something like that today, my uncle would be arrested before he made the Mass/Conn border!
Born 1969, checking in.
Construction areas were my playgrounds.
Pretending I was a soldier dodging enemy fire in the foxholes. Using dried mudballs made the previous day as grenades.
Anything I thought I could climb, I would climb. Trees. Walls. The sides of small buildings that had decorative rock faces.
Leaving at sunrise on a Saturday morning to explore, and not returning until sunset. Tired, sore and happy.
Born in 1956 - it was just what everyone said. No way to turn back the hands of time, but it was a great way to grow up.
Playing in irrigation ditches in Western Nebraska was the closest thing we had to a swimming pool. LOL! And we had fun with that muddy water!
1957 here.....it was a glorious time in Dixie
so many kids and everyone played outside and kids had much more freedom
We used to go play in the DDT fog when the mosquito fog machine came down the truck. The fog was so thick you couldn’t see your buddies or even hear them.
I grew up in southwestern Michigan. It was a grand time to be a kid - lots of youngsters in the neighborhood and always someone to join a game of cops & robbers or cowboys & Indians. Baseball bats turned into machine guns, and I was always envious of the boys who could make such persuasive machine gun noises. We played hide and seek on summer nights until well after the street lights came on. Parents knew we were nearby, and it was OK.
I don't think kids today would know how to play Simon Says, Mother May I, or Red Rover. Cowboys & Indians would just leave them scratching their heads. We loved to jump rope with silly rhymes like the one about the lady with the alligator purse.
Our neighbor had one of those Kool-Aid pitchers with the smile on it, and always had ice cold Kool-Aid for us on hot summer days. She also gave us graham cracker sandwiches filled with leftover chocolate icing whenever she baked a cake for dessert - yum. Our bikes were basic transportation, and we loved to ride over to a local ice cream shop for a treat.
What a great time!
I don’t think we even had locks on the doors to our house.
I’m having trouble reading your post - could you please repost using a larger font? TIA.
I once built an elevated clubhouse in my backyard with nothing more than scraps of wood found around the neighborhood. It had electricity too, courtesy of an extension cord run from the house, and an old light socket and bulb I found, which hung from the ceiling by a nail.
Try to get away with doing that today. You’d have the city inspector down on you so fast your head would spin.
Amen.
When I was a kid in Houston, at dusk the city would send smoke trucks down all the streets and they would blanket the neighborhood in an impenetrable smoke screen. We kids could run or grab our bicycles and follow the truck keeping totally immersed in the smoke until our deep gulping breaths were not enough to keep us going as we tired.
DDT smoke made for some of our best child hood fun, and at dusk it was too dark for any more BB gun fights and rock throwing wars anyway, of course after the smoke cleared, there was always door bell ringing.
Having been born in 1971 I experienced the same. The cutoff date of 1970 is peculiar at best. I’d have probably placed it around 1980 - 1985 (having had a child grow up in that time-frame myself I know what things were like for him). PC really became ferociously evident around 1992 or so and just got worse from there on. I worked at a middle school from 1992-1994 or so and it was bad then.
We would leave the house in the morning during summer and go play ball all day long, sometimes returning for lunch, sometimes not. But we were either home by dark or it was a business meeting with Dad downstairs out of earshot of the younger ones.
When we weren't playing baseball, football or basketball we were building tree houses, battles with the next block over or taking old lawn mower engines and mounting them to old bikes.
And then we started noticing girls and everything changed. :-}
are we sure that this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance
For nearly 2/3 of that time period, God wasn't in the Pledge of Allegiance. We survived that too.
I guess the older we are at this juncture the more daring and uncontrolled our childhood...I was born in 1938, and remember vividly BB-Gun wars (no eyes put out), jumping off a bridge into the swirling tidal rip at the age of 7 and 8 - no cops no complaints - no disciplinary suggestions... Hell - we raised Hell and had a wonderful time, invented all sorts of games, usually variations of the Marines landing on Guadal or Tarrawa, used names that would today put us or our parents in Court, and never (that I remember) hurt ANYBODY, or even ourselves. I was the fastest draw of my cap gun, and went on to the Marines one day to shoot as well. I cherish a lot of those memories, and defy any present day social and intellectual eunuch to suggest that what they enforce today is one particle better!
How’s this for an old memory....late 50’s. My Grandmother(Baba) used to sour her own sauerkraut. She would place my brother and I in the cement stationary laundry tubs in her cellar to scrub our feet....put clean white cotton socks on our feet....then place us standing in huge crocks to stomp on the raw shredded cabbage and salt...then jar the results once it was cured. PRICELESS!!!!
Yes, those were the days. I remember my first paor of ice skates at age 7. I was thrilled, I spent many after school hours on the frozen pond from the time I walked to the pond until it was dark and I knew I had to get home the quickest way was along the RR tracks. From this falling down and getting bloody to playing on the high school team. The concern that my parents had was don’t be late for supper as you will have to eat it cold.
Summers were another grand adventure - camp out in the woods with our sleeping bags made from old blankets with safety pins holding them to-gether, no adults allowed. Built a log cabin with the gang, jeesh, we had axes and saws we were twelve, eleven, we didn’t cut our fingers off or get trapped by a falling tree.
Leaping from the roof of a building to a light pole guy wire with cardboard folded in our hands so we could slide down without burning our hands. Was a good time to be a child. My kids had almost the same as they were born in the covered period, I didn’t worry that they went to the pind and caught crawdads, or came home covered with mud from falling off the raft they made.
I feel for my grandkids they will not know the fabulous feeling of freedom that we had as children.
Meh. I bet YOUR pickup truck had SIDES around the bed. We rode around on the flatbed, clinging to whatever we could for dear life - and loving it!